Digby Solomon on political witch hunts

Digby Solomon

Digby Solomon

In a trifecta of political self-immolation, the Democratic leadership of Virginia placed itself in a no-win position: either lose control of the Governor’s Mansion or expose the hypocrisy of its self-righteousness stance.

The party’s obsession with identity politics and disregard for due process has borne poisoned fruit in a state that only two weeks ago seemed solidly in the blue column.

That’s when we learned Gov. Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook included pictures of a man in blackface and one in a KKK outfit. Democratic party luminaries jostled to be first to demand his resignation.

Within a week, the same conservative website that broke the yearbook story struck again.

It revealed a woman was accusing Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of forcing her to commit a sexual act during the 2004 Democratic National Convention. A second woman then accused him of raping her when both were students at Duke University.

And now Attorney General Mark Herring, who earlier urged the governor to resign, has admitted he too wore blackface while an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia in the ‘80s.

If they believe resignation is the only expiation for bad behavior, Democrats gift the keys to the executive mansion to Republican House Speaker Kirk Cox.

We have become an angry nation besotted by outrage, egged on by social media and traditional media who know ratings candy when they see it.

Democrats, some of whom had a field day attacking U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh for alleged offenses in the 12th grade, learned to their horror that when these wolves are loosed they will turn on anyone.

Gov. Northam once accused Republican adversary Ed Gillespie of racism for decrying the crimes of immigrants who belong to El Salvador’s MS13 gang.

Of the three men, Mr. Fairfax faces the most serious accusations from a legal standpoint. But he deserves a full and impartial hearing, as do the women accusing him. In our country, we are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, not a Twitter feed or Senate speeches.

Messrs. Northam and Herring are at the least guilty of poor taste and racial insensitivity, not to mention breathtaking hypocrisy.

But — news flash to the coastal media — the inane practice of wearing blackface was all too common among some Southern white college students 35 years ago. When do we give credit for growing up?

Unlike Gov. Mills Godwin, who never apologized for his key role in the state’s Massive Resistance to public school integration, Gov. Northam and Mr. Herring have no record of racial intolerance in their public actions.

Surely they deserve some credit for evolving, as our nation has evolved over the past generation, on matters ranging from race to gender.

We all might consider the moral compass of Newport News Mayor McKinley Price, an African-American who knows what it is like to be on the receiving end of racism.

In his typically genteel style, Mr. Price warns against casting the first stone. “I think if people are true to what they will admit, everybody has had some bigotry or racism in their life,” he told The Daily Press. “I think this should be looked at as an opportunity for us to do what, quite frankly, we haven’t done, and that’s (having) an open and frank discussion about bigotry and its effects."

Democrats take heed.

Solomon, the former publisher of the Daily Press, writes a weekly column. Send email to solocolumn@gmail.com.